TRANSCRIPT:
Lawyers from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga have descended on Australia for an intensive, two week workshop, working on how best to present their cases back home.
They're part of a program that's running for the first time this year, facilitated by a group of volunteer senior barristers from the Victorian bar.
Some have been involved in advocacy training in the Pacific for over thirty years, regularly delivering workshops across the region as a part of an International Advocacy Training Program.
Victorian Barrister Maya Rosner says this new scheme, called Train the Trainer, is trialing a different method to build the capacity of lawyers from Pacific countries to train others, so they can become mentors and trainers for law students in the Pacific.
"Up until now, advocacy training has come from outside the Queensland bar, the Victorian bar. Other bars come in and they'll teach advocacy to law students and practitioners. What they don't do is they don't arm the practitioners."
Participant Stacey Levakia-Waley is the assistant director of the Pacific Centre of Judicial Excellence.
She says this new program offers a more sustainable, on-going solution.
"We've had a very long relationship with the Victorian Bar. Twenty years is a very long time for for them to be volunteering their time and coming up every year. So what we are aiming to get out of this particular program is to have us be equipped with those skill sets that they have so that we can work together because it really is not sustainable to have them coming up each year. And if we can complement that, and sort of ease the burden, so to speak, that offers a great a load off of their shoulders, but also we get to teach our own fellow countrymen and women. Plus we're also creating a resource pool within the Pacific."
Angelyn Paranda is Acting Director of the P-N-G Legal Training Institute.
She says the program is a significant step forward for legal training in the region.
"In Papua New Guinea, we know our laws, we know how our judges think we, what's expected of us. We know the practice in our own jurisdiction and that together will I think be very beneficial for everybody in the delivery of justice in our country."
The hope is this pool of home-grown legal experts will continue to grow.
"I think the challenge is for us to go back and make this work, and hopefully this can morph into advanced training and something that can continue into the future."
Participants like Anthony Roden Paru say the close mentoring they receive fills a significant training gap in the Pacific.
"A lot of us who come out from graduate schools, you finish a law program, then you do your practical legal training. Once that's done, that's almost the end of it, and we don't have any other opportunities to upskill. So that's a really huge challenge."
